From what I can see of the emails, they prove no such thing. What they do demonstrate, however, is that scientists, and science itself, are fallible, and subject to the vicissitudes of personality and politics (broadly speaking), just like every other aspect of life. To construct an entire conspiracy theory out of this decades-old fact is to therefore be clutching at straws.

None of this ought to be news for the conservatarians, or anybody else, for that matter, except the former have an irrational fear and hatred of all things that smell even vaguely pomo. Because of this, some fairly basic points, such as science being fallible, or occurring within a context that is full of contingencies, are likely to be new and unfamiliar, despite these points having been made, in different ways,  some time ago.

Indeed, Kuhn argued long ago that ‘more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection data’, and that ‘personal and historical accident is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time’.

Note also that, whatever the purported sins of these AGW scientists from East Bumcrack, their scientific failings are utterly trivial when compared to the shenanigans of Big Pharma, for instance, about whom the conservatarians are entirely silent.

We can expect to see plenty more about this on the blogosphere. (Larvatus Prodeo has a thread here — the comments are interesting, though the post itself pulls its punches, IMHO). This is what constitutes a scientific scandal when an entire generation of computer-literate conservatarians have been getting their ‘science’ from Andrew Bolt and Ann Coulter.